WELCOME to DESS DAHASRY of MALAYSIA..

Friday, November 19, 2010

I came across this article in "The Times of India", the Science section, of course... Read it and is still wondering..
Wow! Star Trek will not be a fantasy anymore...
I would like to share it with you, especially those in favour of the PPSMI.
Sorry for those MBMMBI gang !!!

GENEVA: Scientists claimed a breakthrough on Thursday in solving one of the biggest riddles of physics, successfully trapping the first"anti-atom" that they hope will help them understand what happened to all of the antimatter created by the Big Bang.
It's a real-life version of the immortal 'Star Trek' fantasy, where antimatter is crucial to speed the Starship Enterprise through the galaxy at warp drive, faster than the speed of light.
The international team of physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, managed to create an atom of antihydrogen and then hold onto it for long enough to demonstrate that it can be studied in the lab.
"For us it's a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter,'' the team's spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, said.
In an article in the journal Nature , Cern said it had produced anti-hydrogen atoms — the opposite of a hydrogen atom — in a vacuum and kept them viable for about a tenth of a second.
Some 38 anti-hydrogen atoms have now been trapped long enough for scientists to take a look at them in their quest to understand what happened to antimatter after the Big Bang explosion that is said to have created the universe.

The National Geographic too had their article published yesterday...

A detail of the trap used to combine positrons and antiprotons to create antimatter atoms.

Theories predict that antimatter particles and matter particles have opposite electrical charges but are otherwise nearly identical. Whenever the matter and antimatter meet, they self-annihilate in a shower of pure energy.

Yet for all the similarities, scientists think matter and antimatter must differ in some other fundamental way. That's because, even though matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts during the big bang, the universe we know is made almost entirely of matter.

"It's a central mystery in physics," said Joel Fajans, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new study, published today in the journal Nature.

To make the antiprotons, the team took some of the protons normally used to feed CERN's nearby Large Hadron Collider, smashed them into metal targets, and captured the byproducts. The positrons were captured from a radioactive sodium source.

To get the antiprotons and positrons to bond, the team used an oscillating electric field, nudging the antiprotons into the same energy level as the positrons.

Next came the hard—and unprecedented—part: getting the antimatter particles to sit still.

Aiming for Permanent Antimatter-Atom Incarceration

The major challenge of trapping antimatter is that, once created, the particles are typically too hot and energetic to be trapped.

Fajans likens the task of antihydrogen trapping to games that involve tilting a toy disk to roll a ball bearing into a dimple or hole.

"If the ball is moving too fast, it won't stick in the dimple," Fajans said. "That was our problem with antihydrogen atoms. They were moving too fast to stay stuck in the traps we were making for them."

To slow them down, the team used a series of electric and magnetic fields to cool the antimatter.

Of the millions of antihydrogen atoms the ALPHA team created, only about 38 were cold enough—and slow enough—to be held in a kind of "magnetic bowl" that prevented them from interacting with normal matter.

Because the experiments were intended only to prove that antimatter atoms could be trapped, the team let the antihydrogen atoms go after only two-tenths of a second. But they hope to drastically increase the incarceration time in future experiments.

"Two-tenths of a second is nice, but forever is even better," Fajans said.

And forever may not be so far away. Since the experiments covered in the Nature study, the researchers have created many more antihydrogen atoms and held them for much longer—fodder for a future report.

According to Fajans, "We're doing much better now."

If more antihydrogen atoms can be produced and trapped for longer periods, scientists might finally be able to study them in enough detail to explain their scarcity in our universe, he added.

"It is a big deal," said Bollinger, who didn't take part in the experiment, "but more big deals need to be achieved before precise studies can be made—for example, extending the lifetime of the trapped antihydrogen and identifying the state ... of the antihydrogen."

As for real-world antimatter applications, UC San Diego's Surko said that the harnessing of antimatter as an energy source—say, for use in weapons or a Star Trek-style propulsion system—remains a far-fetched idea.

"The problem is that ... it takes so much more energy to make than you get out that it's pretty inefficient," he said. "And you have to go to great lengths to confine it for a long time."

NIST's Bollinger was likewise skeptical. "The amount of antimatter that can be trapped is very small," he said.

"Even if the efficiency of the trapping process is increased, it is fundamentally limited by the amount of antiprotons that can be generated. Therefore I do not see applications in terms of new energy sources or weapons."

So...just wait and see.. That's the reason why we need to study Maths and Science in English (PPSMI). Thumbs down to those against PPSMI !

ABOUT ME

Simple man. Educationist, Writer, Keyboardist,Composer and Arranger, Qualified Track and Field Coach, Golfer and coach, occasionally give talks on motivation and mathematics.
Like to share facts and experience in the Teaching & Coaching profession.
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